Monday, 9 June 2008

Resolve Evolve Solve - Imagine Cup UK Winners

This past week at the Imagine Cup UK finals, it was announced that Resolve Evolve Solve had won the UK leg of the competition. Which is a great achivement after all the hard work and problems that have occoured throughout this year.

Resolve Evolve Solve is made up of myself (Dominic Green) and Ben Nunney, we both met up through the Microsoft Student Partners program nearly a year ago and decided that we both felt pasionatly about the topic of the enviroment which is the main focus of the Imagine Cup this year along with the fealing that we could make a real difference.

Our entry EnviroMatch is a suite of interactive mini-games that helps to educate students about the enviroment and in doing so help future generations with making the eviroment much more sustainable.

These enviromental mini-games have been deployed used a range of cutting edge technologies from Silverlight 2 Beta1 (Beta2 conversion on way), WCF webservices and also the use of the FaceBook API to create a competative edge to the entry.

Using such technology as the FaceBook API it allows a social networking aspect to be brought to the entry with EnviroMatch scores being displayed on users social network profiles so that users can compete to better their peers, in turn learning mor about the enviroment.

Ben, whilst still doing a masters to become a teacher has been able to test out with the end users as well as the teachers who would be looking to use the entry as a real educational tool. All feedback from both students and teachers have really helped made the entry better and we hope to implement even more of these ideas in the final solution.

The initial proof of concept of the application includes a game whereby users take contol of a young child in a house that has to hurry to turn off all devices in the house to save the most electricity. This is updated in real time on one side of the application, however on problem that was identified was that 20Kw/h of electricity would mean nothing to children, therefore at the end of the game this energy saving is related back to the users in a more understandable way of the ammount of Xbox games a user could buy after saving this much electricity. Hopefully this will hit home with the children.

Now myself and Ben have around 3 weeks to update the application before we head out to Paris to compete in the World Finals of the Imagine Cup. Various updates and new features will be added to the entry before the finals come around.